From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Dec 25 2003 - 10:25:12 EST
On Dec 25, 2003, at 2:25 AM, Jungshik Shin wrote:
> You can think of 'classical Chinese' as 'Latin/classical Greek' of
> East Asia. Up until 'recently', learned people in Japan, Korea (and
> presumably Vietnam perhaps until the 19th century) are well-versed at
> _classical_ written _Chinese_ just like learned Europeans were with
> Latin and classical Greek, which doesn't tell you anything about their
> proficiency in modern Greek. BTW, unlike classical Greek and Latin that
> are rather close to most European languages, classical Chinese is
> heavens
> apart from Japanese and Korean of any age. I guess Vietnamese is a lot
> closer to Chinese than J and K in most metrics.
>
And, of course, it's not entirely clear that classical Chinese was ever
really a spoken language. It certainly didn't reflect the way people
spoke for the bulk of its history.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/
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